1890.] NEW- YORK MICROSCOPICAL SOCIETY. 25 



increasing matter of living beings," this word bioplasm, and in 

 support of its application had urged that " now that the word 

 l)iology has come into common use, it seems desirable to employ 

 the same root in designating the matter which it is the main pur- 

 pose of biology to investigate '"^ The word protoplasm had been 

 associated with too many different substances to suit Doctor 

 Beale's object which was to indicate matter in its most unstable 

 form, before it has become an organ, a structure, a tissue, a 

 cell ; — ^while it is merely formative but still unformed. The 

 older word, as Doctor Drysdale remarks, had " been used in a loose 

 way and applied to objects which have no title to vitality," and, 

 as the term germinal matter had, for some reason, been thought 

 inconvenient. Doctor Beale sought to create a name which 

 should mean simply and 's.olQXy living plastic matter, or, as Huxley 

 afterwards called it, life-stuff. ^\\\. protoplasm could not be dis- 

 possessed and, though bioplasm is probably the better word, the 

 older name descended by inheritance to the new idea, and even 

 Beale himself accepted and used it in his later works. 



In fact, there may be very good reason for this supremacy of 

 the original designation if, as Doctor Drysdale asserts, " the living 

 matter of Beale corresponds to the following histological elements 

 of other authors : the viscid nitrogenous substance within the 

 primordial utricle, called by von Mohl, protoplasm ; the prim- 

 ordial utricle itself in Naegeli's sense of that term, viz., the 

 layer of protoplasm next the cell-wall ; the transparent, semi- 

 fluid matter occupying the spaces and intervals between the 

 threads and walls of those spaces formed by the so-called vacuo- 

 lation of protoplasmic masses ; the greater part of the sarcode 

 of the monera, rhizopoda, and other low organisms ; the white 

 blood-corpuscles, pus-corpuscles, and other naked wandering 

 masses of living matter ; the so-called nucleus of the secreting 

 cells, and of the tissues of the higher animals, and many plant- 

 cells ; the nuclei of the cells of the grey matter of the brain, 

 spinal marrow, and ganglions, and the nuclei of nerve-fibres." 



Doctor Beale himself puts the case quite as strongly in his 

 latest work on this general topic, in which he says : " if certain 

 authorities were asked to define exactly the characters of the 

 matter which they called protoplasm, we should have from those 



>3 Quart. Jour. Mic. Sci. July, 1870. 



